how to get the game to send back score telemetry so you can optimize your game

[Wabbajackalope]

Greetings,

i want to have the game send a message to me telling me information about the scores and so forth on each level when they win or lose them, how would i go about telling the machine to phone home?

i have a website at my disposal to gather this information, the problem is on one end i need to send the information out and on the other end collect what could be quite a bit of information from a broad list of locations.

and is their any way i can get in any legal trouble for doing this? im not interested in personal information on the person just the score they got when they finished a level.

thank you.

 

[Llama_Code]

You would want to let the user know your doing this, and maybe give them the option to opt out, but modern games collect tons of information on how they are played, where players die, etc.

I collect it in a database personally. I have found this is the easiest way for me to collect it, store it, and, sort it.

I use this to monitor the data
https://www.dbvis.com/features/tour/charts/

I track how long people play in a session, how long they spend on levels, where they die at, level of game to get an idea when people drop off, what difficulty level they play as, what platform and more. It will vary by what type of game it is. But the data is just anonymously sent by the game, I have no way of knowing where it came from.

 

[rui.rosario]

In order to decrease the amount of information collected you could collect data "offline" until you had X amount of information, process it locally in order to acquire some overall interesting values (for example: player died 10 times on level 1 with scores below 500, instead of the 10 scores) and then send only that processed information.

Creating a REST API (doesn't need to be complex, just an endpoint where you can send somewhat formatted data to) on your website that connected to a database specific for the game's telemetry would probably be one of the best home-made options.

 

[Llama_Code]

Yes I probably should have specified I don't collect data on EVERY play, for example every single time a player dies, but if they die x times in the same spot, or in the same level I send it to look for trends.

And for some games I will collect play time and submit an average like once a week. You don't want every minute detail of what people are doing or you will get an over abundance of potentially mostly useless data. I try and track player trends to try and see if those trends persist across the player base.